Well it’s about time – if any company should be advertising itself all over YouTube, surely Google should be right? Well welcome to Gmail theatre, a series of decidedly low-tech commercials Google is using to promote their Gmail service. Now I don’t have official numbers so don’t quote me on this, but the total budget for the whole thing is probably in the low thousands, including all attributed labor costs and associated puppetry. So what kind of response rate do they need to beat the ROI most companies get on their marketing campaigns? Why aren’t more companies doing this yet?

Of course, it has a long way to go before it’s viewed as many times as this video on how to log-in to the Google TV Beta program. Which is very, very interesting – and reportedly an elaborate hoax. For now at least.